Posts Tagged ‘Freedom’

It began in the early 1940s. FDR had launched the New Deal’s collectivization of America, and a small but prescient group of libertarian and conservative intellectuals were in rebellion – such thinkers as Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand, to be followed a decade later by the likes of Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, and Murray Rothbard.

Out of their cerebral and activist efforts there began the movement to repeal the overweening statism that was infiltrating America from Europe via Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. The infamous year of 1913 was the infiltration’s major manifestation. FDR’s New Deal was its Rubicon. In reaction to the radical political changes taking place during the 1913-1940 era, today’s freedom movement was born.

It is not well-known by the general public, but when the modern freedom movement first began in the early 1940s, it was not split between libertarians and conservatives. It was one coalition unified in rebellion against FDR’s monster welfare state. By 1970, however, the movement had become tragically bifurcated. The radical economist Murray Rothbard took libertarians off into anarchy, while the traditionalist philosopher Russell Kirk drove conservatives into statism. This split has created two incomplete visions – contemporary libertarianism and conservatism – that are, in their singularity, incapable of effectively challenging the authoritarian mega-state.

Conservatives are caught up in the puritanical swamps of legislating morality and hegemonic conquest of the world, while libertarians chase the philosophical absurdities of moral subjectivism and ersatz individualism. Conservatives wish to return to the Middle Ages and mandate morality via the state, while Libertarians wish to do away with any reference to morality altogether. Conservatives revere leaders like Savonarola and John Calvin. Libertarians excite themselves with Larry Flynt and the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.” Somewhere the Founding Fathers are twisting in their graves over each of these political movements and their embarrassing lack of comprehension concerning the requisites for a free and individualist society.

How do we confront this lack of comprehension? We must purge the libertarian and conservative movements of the fallacies they have adopted from Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk. This will require a “rational theory of politics” that can bring together the two philosophical streams of John Locke and Edmund Burke so as to restore the original Republic of States that Jefferson and the Founders envisioned. More on this theory shortly.

The Tragic Bifurcation

In the aftermath of LBJ’s defeat of the Goldwater forces in the 1964 election, most libertarians, under the influence of the pied piper Murray Rothbard, split off from the official path of the freedom movement and wandered into the utopian forest of some very radical political-philosophical principles – those of anarchism.

In contrast, conservatives went the other direction by abandoning principle altogether to align themselves with Irving Kristol’s collectivist neo-conservatives and tolerate the very government usurpations their movement had been formed to repeal. They began their sellout when Richard Nixon declared in 1971 that, “We’re all Keynesians now.” They continued it with Ronald Reagan’s massive expansion of the welfare state and when George W. Bush launched a tide of spending, privilege, and corruption totally unhinged from sanity and reality.

Can today’s freedom movement be rescued from this tragedy of default? Can the American people be convinced to restore the Republic? Yes, but in order for such a revolution to actually take place, American libertarians and conservatives must face up to some unsettling realities and take appropriate action.

The conservative wing of the “freedom movement” has been grievously corrupted by Machiavellian statists. The most important cause of this has been Russell Kirk’s philosophical emphasis on tradition being transcendent to reason and his rejection of “equal individual rights” in favor of special privileges and a flexible Constitution. This has led conservatives into a Faustian bargain with the statist enemy and opened the door for the hijacking of their movement by neoconservatives, thus moving most of today’s conservatives to the left into lockstep with statist liberals.

The libertarian wing of the “freedom movement” has been equally corrupted, but in the opposite direction to the far right on the spectrum. The most important cause of this has been Murray Rothbard’s anarchist politics that privatizes all functions of the government, even the military, police, and courts of law. In addition his followers espouse an egoistic “do your own thing” culture that refuses to morally condemn the traditional evils of history. Whatever is peaceful is their creed. It is a sense of life that worships what the Greeks called the sin of “eleutheromania,” freedom without limits.

To better understand the nature of this disastrous split between libertarians and conservatives, a brief exposition of America’s concept of freedom is necessary.

Jeffersonianism Is America’s Philosophy

The American concept of freedom has its ideological roots in the Founders’ libertarian political ideal, combined with conservative metaphysics and culture. It is a blend of the 17th and 18th century thinkers, John Locke and Edmund Burke (one libertarian and the other conservative), which heavily influenced Americans from the start and up through World War I – the former emphasizing reason and individualism, the latter tradition and community. It manifested in what is called Jeffersonianism.

This political philosophy stands for the individual over the collective, a strictly limited constitutional government based upon federalism, equal “rights” instead of equal “results,” a free-market economy, no entangling foreign alliances, and an objective code of morality for society as opposed to the moral neutrality of Rothbardians and modern liberals. This is what needs to be restored.

The famous conservative philosopher, Richard Weaver, at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, and author of the great classic, Ideas Have Consequences, understood well this Jeffersonian concept of America and shaped his defense of freedom around it accordingly. Unlike today’s neoconservatives, Weaver understood the necessity of limiting the tyrannical danger of the state. He would be horrified with today’s neoconservative attacks upon the Founders’ vision of laissez-faire. He grasped the philosophical common ground between libertarianism and conservatism:

“[C]onservatives and libertarians stand together,” he said. “Both of them believe that there is an order of things which will largely take care of itself if you leave it alone.” Weaver was a strict constitutionalist because a Constitution provided for a “settled code of freedom for the individual.”

This is the crucial issue of our time – restoration of libertarian conservatism in America and its “settled code of freedom for the individual.” If we, who believe in free enterprise and the Constitution, wish to reverse America’s drift into an authoritarian state, our goal must not be to accommodate, but to purge the Gargantua on the Potomac that usurps our rights and freedoms with impunity. Libertarians and conservatives must be reunited to effectively challenge this monster.

My book, The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values explains the need for this ideological unification and how to bring it about. I realize authors don’t usually promote their own books in their articles, but in defense of my lack of orthodoxy, I cite the popular economist, Walter Williams.

Several years ago he was writing a review in his newspaper column for one of his own books. And in defense of his partisan effort, Professor Williams explained to his readers that his mother had always told him, “it’s a poor dog who won’t wag his own tail.” So if the reader will indulge me, I would like to partake in a little tail wagging.

The Golden Mean is the philosophical answer to our immensely troubled times. It puts forth the “rational theory of politics” referred to earlier, and which we desperately need in order to challenge the authoritarian statism that has been destroying our republic ever since 1913.

The libertarian movement is lost in “utopian unreality.” The conservative movement is lost in “statist appeasement.” This is because of the disastrous libertarian-conservative split spawned by Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk back in the 1960s. Without a correction of this split, freedom cannot be adequately defended and restored. Both libertarian and conservative activists are terribly misguided in their insistence on remaining separate movements. Conservatism needs libertarian politics in order to be just, and libertarianism needs conservative moral values in order to be workable.

The statist Gargantua controls our lives today because there is no effective ideological counterforce to overthrow its moral-philosophical-theoretical base. The Golden Mean provides that counterforce because it shows how to once again merge the two great systems of philosophical thought that brought America into being: libertarianism and conservatism. It shows how to recapture the Jeffersonian ideal.

“Tree Of Liberty Must Be Refreshed From Time to Time With The Blood Of Patriots & Tyrants.”

WASHINGTON DC - USA – As President Barack Hussein Obama vowed to put his full weight into banning and restricting gun ownership in the US in a landmark speech today, Americans across their great nation have an uneasy feeling inside of them. Their founding fathers warned them that this day would one day come.

America was built on the premise of Freedom, Liberty and Justice. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America fought so hard for their nation, for their people. They would be truly appalled at what is happening now in their cherished land, where Freedom is being choked, where Liberty is being smothered, and where Justice is being subverted.

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, where are you now that your people need you so? Their spirits live only in the constitution of the United States but for how much longer?

How long can you, the people, stand by and watch the good decent American tenets that the Founding Fathers wrote, be torn up and thrown on the floor like a piece of trash? Are you going to stand there when they come to take away all of your freedom? Are you going to stand there when they tell you you are wrong to believe in Freedom, Justice and Liberty?

“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever” said John Adams.

And when they come for your guns remember these words from Thomas Paine: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

As the TSA worker touches your young daughter, quote these words from James Madison out to the people standing in the checkpoint: “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

The Founding Fathers knew what was coming and they prepared the American people for this very outcome, they knew that some day the very government that was meant to govern the people would be the tyranny that terrorises the people. They knew that eventually things have to be treated to get better, just like an illness, America is sick and the only doctor that can cure it is YOU the people. Don’t let the corrupt tyranny put you in a FEMA camp. Don’t let the corrupt hypocrites and liars tell you that you are wrong to believe in the goodness that you believe in. Don’t let these pirates who have taken over change the laws anymore. YOU are the law. YOU the people are the law.

Thomas Jefferson knew what eventually happens in government when he said: “Experience hath shown that even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

And to no end, he also meant it, when he said: “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

As 2012 draws to a close, it’s hard not to be reminded that 2013 will begin with Ron Paul retired from Congress. For all those years he was a fearless truth-teller, who exposed and denounced the horrors, domestic or foreign, of the regime. His farewell address – something practically unheard of for a congressman in the first place – will continue to be read years from now, as future Americans look back with astonishment that such a man actually served in the US Congress.

For most of his career, those speeches were delivered to a largely empty chamber and to audiences of modest size around the country. A man of Ron’s intelligence could have grown in stature and influence in no time at all had he been willing to play the game. He wasn’t. And he was perfectly at peace with the result: although he wasn’t a major political celebrity, he had done his moral duty.

Little did he know that those thankless years of pointing out the State’s lies and refusing to be absorbed into the Blob would in fact make him a hero one day. To see Ron speaking to many thousands of cheering kids, when all the while respectable opinion had been warning them to stay far away from this dangerous man, is more gratifying and encouraging than I can say. I was especially thrilled when a tempestuous Ron, responding to the Establishment’s description of his campaign as “dangerous,” said, you’re darn right – I am dangerous, to them.

Some people used to tell Ron that if only he’d stop talking about foreign policy he might win more supporters. He knew it was all nonsense. Foreign policy was the issue that made Ron into a phenomenon. There would have been no Ron Paul movement in the first place had Ron not distinguished himself from the pack by refusing to accept the cartoonish narrative, peddled not only by Rudy Giuliani but also by the luminaries of both major political parties, accounting for the origins of 9/11.

How many bills did he pass, right-wing scoffers demand to know. A successful Republican politician, in between his usual activity of expanding government power, is supposed to have rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic five or six times, by means of bills with his name on them. At best, the bills these politicos boast about amounted to marginal changes of momentary significance, if even that. More commonly, even the bills they trumpeted turned out to be ambiguous or actually negative from a libertarian standpoint.

What is Ron’s legacy? Not some phony bill, of zero significance in the general avalanche of statism. For his legacy, look around you.

The Federal Reserve, an issue not discussed in American politics in a hundred years, is under greater scrutiny now than ever before. Austrian economics is enjoying a rebirth that dwarfs the attention it received when F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 1974 – and when you ask people how they heard about the Austrian School, the universal answer is Ron Paul. One man brought about this intellectual revolution. How’s that for a legacy?

And that’s not to mention how many people Ron introduced to libertarian thought in general, or how many hawks reconsidered their position on war because of Ron’s arguments and example.

Even the mainstream media has to acknowledge the existence of a whole new category of thinker: one that is antiwar, anti-Fed, anti-police state, and pro-market. The libertarian view is even on the map of those who despise it. That, too, is Ron’s doing.

Young people are reading major treatises in economics and philosophy because Ron Paul recommended them. Who else in public life can come close to saying that?

How manybills did he get passed? Talk about missing the point.

Where are the hordes of students dying to learn from Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, or Mitt Romney?

Remember, too, that in politics there’s always some excuse for why the message of liberty can’t be delivered. I have to satisfy the party leadership. I have to keep the media off my back. The moment is inopportune. My constituents aren’t ready to hear it – so instead of explaining myself and persuading them, I’ll just keep my mouth shut, or minimize my position to the point where I sound like any old politician, except ten percent better.

And all the while, would-be donors are assured that this is all a facade, that the politician is really one of us and not what he appears to be. For the time being, you understand, he has to contradict his core beliefs in order to ingratiate himself into the favor of those whose support he will one day need.

Once elected, he still cannot really say what he thinks. Don’t you want him to get re-elected?

Ron never acted this way. At times he would explain the libertarian position in ways likely to resonate with a particular audience, but he never compromised or backed away.

It’s been said that if you ask Ron Paul a question, he gives you a straight answer. That’s an understatement. All through his presidential campaigns he sent the guardians of opinion into hysterics. Why, he can’t say that! That wasn’t even one of the choices! To the gatekeepers’ astonishment, his numbers kept on growing.

No politician is going to trick the public into embracing liberty, even if liberty were his true goal and not just a word he uses in fundraising letters. For liberty to advance, a critical mass of the public has to understand and support it. That doesn’t have to mean a majority, or even anywhere near it. But some baseline of support has to exist.

That is why Ron Paul’s work is so important and so lasting.

Ten years from now, no one will remember the men who opposed Ron in the GOP primaries. Half of them are forgotten already. But fifty years from now (and longer), young kids will still be learning from Ron: reading his books, following his recommendations for further study, and taking inspiration from his courage and principle.

With Ron’s Congressional career drawing to a close, we should remember that we have witnessed something highly unusual, and exceedingly unlikely to be repeated. And we should also remember Ron’s parting advice: the real revolution is not in Washington, DC. It’s in the world of ideas.

That’s what Ron is devoting the rest of his life to, and it’s one more thing he has to teach us. So watch for news of his institutionalized work for peace, his homeschooling curriculum, his homepage, and his TV network. Far from retiring, Ron Paul is stepping up his work for liberty. And in this work, there is a place for all of us.

“Our country has already been taken over. I want to secede back to the Republic, back to our nation. The new world order has taken over. We’re not fighting just some corrupt politicians and it’s a little political issue. We have serious, hardcore authoritarians, Ron Paul called them yesterday authoritarian psychopaths, in control. We know what tyranny is historically. This is the worst case of it I’ve ever seen. And it’s growing and coming to fruition very, very quickly.” – Alex Jones, “Talk Show Host Calls For Second American Revolution!” November 15, 2012.

“As over a million Americans express their disenfranchisement with the federal government by supporting a secessionist movement that has spread like wildfire, it is time to call for a new declaration of independence and a new commitment to restore the Republic in the face of an enemy that has subverted America from within.” – Paul Joseph Watson, “Ron Paul: The Founders Believed in Secession,” November 15, 2012.

“We are going to force the issue with the globalists, because here’s the key. We’re not seceding from the federal government. We are recognizing and declaring what is self-evident that the federal government has been hijacked by foreign banking cartels.” – Alex Jones, “TRANSCRIPT: Alex Jones – Secede from the New World Order,” November 15, 2012.

Since when did self-determination become a dirty word? Isn’t this the slogan that America fights for abroad? Why, then, does the U.S. government deny this principle at home? Why is the federal government more interested in the self-determination of Iraqis, Afghans, and Syrians than of Americans?

A government that denies its own basic principles and laws does not deserve to be listened to and followed. Secession from such a poisonous government is a moral and spiritual duty.

Alex Jones is on the right side of history by calling for secession from the bankster-hijacked federal government. He is standing up for America and for freedom-loving people worldwide.

The current oligarchical owners of the U.S. government forfeited their claim to rule the American people when they murdered three thousand innocent Americans on September 11, 2001, and then proceeded to destroy the laws and freedoms of the United States by hyping the fake terrorist threat. They seceded from America on that day. The rightful response is to secede from these savages, counterfeiters, aggressors, and liars.

Secession is not an act of treason, it is one of many peaceful political solutions to problems that have been long in the making. The states can rebuilt the American economy by seceding from the corrupt federal reserve system that stole the federal government from the American people in 1913. They should create their own currencies and issue their own credit to their citizens and businesses since the federal reserve and federal government aren’t doing it.

The federal government can honestly fix economic injustices by either abolishing the corrupt federal reserve system or nationalizing it and reclaiming the right to issue money from the transnational private banking cartel. If this does not happen, then the states have a right and a responsibility to their citizens to secede from a collapsing and morally bankrupt banking system.

The Dollar is dead. The era of private central banking is finished. Public banking is the future. Gold and silver is the future. Honest money is the future. If the federal government will not get on the right side of history then the states must.

If the question is asked, why secede? Give this answer: why obey? The hijacked federal government is proposing austerity and war. It is intellectually, morally, financially, spiritually, and politically bankrupt. Here is an excerpt from the Infowars article, “Why The States Must Secede To Save America”:

The federal government is supposed to represent the states, but it doesn’t, it represents the interests of the political and banking elite who themselves have no allegiance whatsoever to America.”

The age of treason is not over, but there is a new age of global political awakening in which corrupt political leaders and international financial fraudsters are getting the biggest wake up call in history. Humanity wants to be free. The sick perverts who rule England, America, and other nations must step down from office and face the legal consequences of their actions.

The transition to a new age of freedom won’t be easy. But liberty must be fought for in every generation. In our time, the greatest freedom to be won is the freedom of the mind. Totalitarian ideologies such as political Islamism, Zionism, and Counter-Terrorism have deprived nations in the East and the West of this sacred freedom which is the source of all others.

As socially conscious and politically aware global citizens, it is our duty to destroy these totalitarian ideologies and liberate the individual from the prison of systematic government brainwashing. Our demand is clear: The brainwashing of all humans by all governments must end.

We are not mental subjects of governments, but creative children of God, and God has no official state ideology. Governments of the world must recognize this divine demand and stop using the media as a tool to instill propaganda into the minds of their citizens. That is the way of the past. It is a dead way. We live in a different time now, a time of spiritual evolution.

There are creative and peaceful remedies to government brainwashing and mass mind control. The global alternative media is the key to saving liberty because the free access to information is critical if we want to form our own opinions.

In his farewell speech in Congress, Dr. Ron Paul said, “The internet will provide the alternative to the government/media complex that controls the news and most political propaganda.” He also said that the growth in popularity of homeschooling will lead to new thinking, new ideas, and new reforms. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

It is self-evident that our freedoms have been severely limited and the apparent prosperity we still have, is nothing more than leftover wealth from a previous time. This fictitious wealth based on debt and benefits from a false trust in our currency and credit, will play havoc with our society when the bills come due. This means that the full consequence of our lost liberties is yet to be felt.

But that illusion is now ending. Reversing a downward spiral depends on accepting a new approach.

Expect the rapidly expanding homeschooling movement to play a significant role in the revolutionary reforms needed to build a free society with Constitutional protections. We cannot expect a Federal government controlled school system to provide the intellectual ammunition to combat the dangerous growth of government that threatens our liberties.

Government schools are about indoctrination, and “sheep-herding,” as the genius and poet Ezra Pound described it.

Totalitarian governments treat the mass of people as sheep to be brainwashed, robbed, and slaughtered.

The history of the totalitarian states in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union proved that totalitarianism is the death of the soul and the annihilation of the individual.

Individuals in America have a moral and spiritual duty to mentally secede from a war-possessed totalitarian government that is only interested in enslaving, killing, robbing, lying, spying, and cheating. It is the right and honourable course. I stand with them, and with all humans who want to mentally and spiritually secede from oppressive governments.

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